Kenneth J. Saltman and David A. Gabbard
As we prepared the first edition of Education as Enforcement for publication, the United States—with more than a hundred permanent military bases around the globe—was a nation at war in Afghanistan. As the second edition goes to print, the United States has been at war on two fronts for over eight years with high troop levels expected to continue in Iraq indefinitely and the war in Afghanistan escalated by a president who campaigned on ending the war in Iraq and who (in the tradition of Kissinger who also won the Peace Prize before escalating the Vietnam War) gave a Nobel Peace Prize speech defending his war escalation. The Obama administration has expanded war to Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, while continuing rendition, the outsourcing of torture, and the vast use of for-profit military contractors whose private status enables them to operate in ways that are illegal for U.S. troops. Entering first-year university students in the United States in 2010–2011 will have spent about half of their lives living in a nation at war and will have experienced the events of 9/11/01 as children. These facts illustrate the extent to which the waging of war has become a kind of natural social fact, a backdrop for life in the United States, but also at the same time something largely kept out of the consciousness and experience of most American citizens’ daily lives. Infotainment, advertising, and public relations, a steady stream of celebrity-oriented trivia, and gossip educate most citizens heavily. Despite being awash in unlimited information that they could use to participate in democratic public life they are largely produced not as participating citizens, but rather principally as consumers and spectators. The central concern of the book remains the ways that schooling and other educative forces undermine the conditions for public and critical forms of democracy.
The first edition of Education as Enforcement was a successful book in part because it spoke to dramatic transformations in schools and society in a timely way. Since that publication the militarization of schools, the corporatization of schools and significant anti-democratic trends have all significantly increased. The militarization of schools has expanded most notably through the increasing efforts to open JROTC programs across the US, the ongoing cultural pedagogies of mass media that educate children and adults to identify with militaristic, authoritarian and anti-democratic practices, the expansion of public schools run as military academies, the expansion of the troops to teachers program, and the expansion of military leaders idealized as school leaders. Critics and activists continue to point out that many of these programs (especially JROTC and military academies) aggressively target poor and working-class youth of color for military recruitment, deny high-quality public schooling to these students and then offer instead military educations, fail to address the sexual orientation discrimination in the military and its incompatibility with the anti-discrimination demands of public schooling, and expand into public schooling deeply conservative values including militarism, patriarchy, and hierarchical and authoritarian social relations.
Since the publication of the first edition of this book, public schools have been converted into military academies both as stand-alone schools and as “carve outs” of existing schools. Chicago leads the nation with both the most JROTC programs and the most public schools run as military academies. Intersecting with neoliberal “choice” initiatives these academies, which receive funding from both traditional sources as well as the U.S. Department of Defense, offer a military education to students who are otherwise offered severely underfunded public schools. Rather than investing in the curricular and instructional improvement of those schools, such “choice” schemes hold students hostage to versions of schooling that, for example, teach science and mathematics through naval warfare.
Shortly before the first edition of Education as Enforcement, the United States had begun significantly militarizing civil society with the USA Patriot Act, the erosion of posse commitatus, the replacement of judicial process by military tribunal, the legal and cultural justification of torture as a tool of state policy, the military recruitment of youth, and the transformation of schools into military academies. The Bush administration and the corporate media had also begun a cultural pedagogical project in which a spectacle of jingoistic patriotism and the terrorism alleged to justify it merged with a fanatical defense of “our way of life,” defined by the endless expansion of consumerism and corporate wealth concentration backed by neoliberal ideology and its market fundamentalism. In spite of campaign promises to restore U.S. observance of and respect for Constitutional and international law, the Obama administration has extended the USA Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, kept open Guantanamo, expanded the notorious Bagram prison, and continues torture, spying on civilians, and assassinations.1
As the introduction to the first edition (which the editors have retained in the collection) suggests, the book seeks to explain the relationship between the expansion of military and corporate language, models, and practices in schools and society. A central connection between these trends is neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism is an ideology that pushes privatization (the selling off of public institutions to private ownership and control) and deregulation (the redistribution from the public to the private sector controls and limits over trade, investment, and labor) while suggesting that all public goods be understood privately as markets. As Pierre Bourdieu suggested shortly before his death, neoliberalism guts the caregiving role of the state and promotes its repressive roles, especially military and policing. Education as Enforcement contends that the crisis of political democracy facing the United States owes in large part to neoliberalism and the end to a “constitutive outside” of liberal capitalism. The sense that there is no alternative to the present other than to enforce the dictates of the capitalist economy was not shaken by the events of 9/11, but rather reinforced with the discourse of national security drastically expanded as a defense of “our way of life.” The Bush administration positioned all alternatives to U.S.-style liberal capitalism or repressive regimes friendly to it as elements of an “axis of evil.” Another way to understand this is that the post-9/11 security state marked the project of more aggressively militarizing the integration of the “non-integrating gap.” In this sense the pre-9/11 corporate and state ideal of neoliberal globalization was deepened over the first decade of the new century. Yet, the neoconservative movement that put George W. Bush in the White House and sought to expand nation-state based, unipolar power has resulted, in the words of Giovanni Arrighi, in “hegemony unraveling.” The United States is a financially and militarily overextended empire, awash in foreign debt, using public money to bail out private industry—a kind of socialism for the super-rich. Rather than countering these trends the Obama administration has largely continued them, assuring that half of the federal budget will go for military spending, escalating military attacks that kill civilians in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, redistributing wealth upward and using public wealth to help the richest citizens while ensuring that the reforms to healthcare, education, and housing remain under corporate control.
There are high social costs to the ongoing expansion of militarism, the ongoing culture of neoliberalism, and the repressive and business-framed remaking of public education in the United States. Perhaps most crucially at a moment in history when Americans need a critical vocabulary and the theoretical, historical, ethical, and political tools to interpret and act on the pressing public problems facing the U.S. and the world, U.S. public schooling is increasingly being remade to remove critical and intellectual practices in favor of scripted lessons, high-stakes testing, “banking education,” and approaches to teaching and learning that are effectively prohibitions on thinking.
The corporatization of schooling includes the expansion of for-profit companies running schools (EMOs), for-profit and non-profit charter schooling, expansion of voucher schemes, and expanded managerialism that imagines schools as businesses, students as consumers of educational services, and parents as shoppers. Within this view the goals of universal public provision of schooling is replaced with the metaphors of “competition” and “choice.” The historical legacy of unequal educational distribution is reinterpreted in this view as a problem with too little market discipline. Only if public schools are forced to compete against each other for scarce resources, so goes the thinking, can the public ever expect to see them improve. The assumption in this view is that the lack of educational quality is primarily a matter of teacher, student, and administrator indiscipline (a frequently gender- and racially-coded accusation) and that the corporate reforms can impose the necessary discipline to force everyone to “do their job.” This now prevalent punitive thinking dominates No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top as well as the larger testing and “value added” agendas dominating the contemporary reform scene. These assumptions misunderstand motivations, presuming that everyone wants primarily to “get away with” not teaching well. In reality, most teachers are motivated by the deep satisfaction they get from students learning and by a passion for what they teach. Most students are motivated by curiosity and fascination when subjects are meaningful. The dominant wrong-headed imperatives of enforcing the “right” knowledge undermine teaching and learning as intellectual and creative processes of investigation and curiosity. They kill the passion for learning by making knowledge a dead thing to be consumed. They then blame students and teachers for failing to be excited by dead knowledge rendered meaningless and decontextualized through standardization. An endless series of corporate and military reforms are then brought into schooling in hopes of “enforcing the right knowledge.” This enforcement thinking is the problem, not the solution it purports to be. Perhaps most importantly, as knowledge is rendered decontextualized, meaningless, and ossified, students are hindered from comprehending knowledge in relation to broader public matters and social problems, the experiences of daily life and the structures of power shaping those experiences.
Educational policy-makers, politicians across political parties, think tanks, and mass media continue to accept the neoliberal view that schooling should principally serve the needs of business to make future consumers and workers while undercutting the crucial democratic role schools play in preparing citizens for active self governance. Such preparation requires that students develop the critical tools to interpret and act collectively on public problems. Yet the corporate school reforms of measuring learning largely through standardized tests, teacher and student cash for grades and scores, private contracting, heavy reliance on for-profit textbook and testing—all of these promote conceptions of learning which shut down the most crucial critical questions: Whose version of truth is put forward and why? What is the relationship between claims to truth and claims to social authority? What historical and social conditions give rise to particular claims to truth? How are claims to truth related to broader social forces and struggles? How are particular bodies of knowledge valued relative to others?
Between the editions of this book assisted by massive tax cuts on the rich, slashed social spending, and deregulating markets to allow for reckless speculation, concentrations of wealth reached unprecedented levels in the United States, described by some as a second gilded age. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey aptly explains,2 has been a project of class warfare waged by the rich on the rest. Neoliberal educational reform is no exception to this, aiming to turn public schools into private investment, to treat schooling as a private consumable commodity, and to gut out the democratic, critical, and public aspects of education to make docile “disciplined” subjects through high-stakes testing, standardization of curriculum, and attacks on teacher work, while imaging schools as businesses that should be run by “bullish CEOs” drawn from the military and the corporate sector.
The role of public education within this dominant view has intensified since 1983’s A Nation at Risk report which at the outset of the neoliberal “Reagan Revolution” recast education as a matter of military and economic competition. Schools are to make foremost consumers and workers who can contribute to global economic competition for the nation. This view reduces national security to a matter of the health of the corporate economy and its capacity to maintain ever greater spending on military contracting to project the power of the one superpower and enforce global order in a form acceptable to U.S. “interests” (capital). In 2008 the U.S. spent a total of about a trillion dollars on education, but the federal government only contributes about 8 percent of that money. In contrast, U.S. military spending, which is largely all federal, ran to about $700 billion in 2008. In that year, the United States accounted for 48 percent of total world military spending. The U.S. also remains, year-after-year, one of the top sellers of weapons to other countries around the world. The U.S. also wields power through repressive force by maintaining the world’s largest prison system by far, with 1 in 100 Americans living incarcerated as of 2009 with for-profit prisons and for-profit juvenile detention growing as industries.
As the second edition of Education as Enforcement goes to press, despite escalating military engagement, the neoconservative dream of a unipolar superpower has unraveled. It has become evident that the United States cannot afford to assert imperial aggression indefinitely. Also, with the financial crisis of 2008 and the massive state intervention to save Wall Street, the basic tenets of neoliberal economic doctrine (unfettered deregulation and privatization) have been largely discredited. Yet, in education, neoliberal assumptions are being aggressively pursued across the political spectrum in multiple forms of privatization, deregulation, managerialism, and union-busting as well as resurgent positivism. The first edition contended that it was not principally the militarizing of schools and civil society that keeps Americans consenting to or even supporting policies hostile to public forms of democratic life. Instead, it suggested that it was the cultural pedagogies of mass media that play a crucial role in educating citizens by producing identifications and subject positions conducive to violent, militarized and destructively market-based solutions to social problems. The collapse of neoliberal economic tenets and the failure of military solutions to global problems reveal the deep flaws in these anti-democratic approaches that render them utterly unsustainable both economically and ecologically.
Preparing a second edition of this book affords us the opportunity both to elaborate on the terms of its central thesis and update our readers on how events since 2003 have reinforced its original relevance. In the first place, we recognize that any system of education will promote certain values, dispositions, and habits of mind over others. In this sense, education is an inherently normative term. If our dominant institutions were democratic in any meaningful sense, individual citizens would participate in public debates and dialogue on what norms should prevail in guiding the curricular and instructional processes in our schools. In our view, those norms should be democratic ones. That is, they should promote values, dispositions, and habits of mind that would empower individuals to exercise their political rights and civic responsibilities meaningfully in shaping social institutions to serve their collective interests—the common or public good.
Our dominant institutions, however, do not originate from the political sphere. Judged in terms of their influence on our lives, the dominant institutions in our society are overwhelmingly economic ones. They include huge multinational corporations, the financial and investment industries, international banking, and other firms that today comprise a vast system of unaccountable private power dedicated to one chief purpose—the pursuit and accumulation of profit. We can assess the dominance of these networks of highly interdependent, institutions in a variety of ways. Though most of the market system operates beyond the scope of the average person’s direct experience, almost no one on the planet escapes contact with it. We all live, whether we are aware of it or not, in complete dependency on the market. It provides us with jobs that afford us the financial means to purchase the goods and services that we need for our survival. Those institutions, then, own both the means and the ends of our existence, placing us in such deep dependency on them that it becomes tempting to say that they even own us.
When it comes to characterizing American society, then, we view it as far more accurate to describe the United States as a market society rather than a democratic society. While we clearly have democratic forms, the dominant influence of our economic institutions over the political sphere strips those forms of much of their significance. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the continuity in educational policy across our two political parties that we hope to capture in this second edition.
Because they function as government institutions and occupy space within the political sphere, we cannot properly separate our macro-analysis of schools from our analysis of the state. Before we ask what schools enforce, we must first ask what the state enforces. To avoid positing a thoroughly reductionist argument here, we must be clear that we read American history as the story of the unfolding tensions between democratic versus market values, public versus private (corporate) interests. At various points in time, democratic values and public interests have clearly prevailed (e.g., the abolition of slavery, the various struggles in the expansion of civil rights and protections for workers, women, racial minorities, the disabled, and children, and efforts to protect the commons through environmental legislation). Just as with the current public demand for universal health care, however, each of those populist struggles has met the greatest resistance from the corporate sector. Similarly, we can reasonably compare the contemporary corporate effort to deny the role of human activity in global warming with the tobacco industry’s denial of the adverse health effects of cigarettes in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, we cannot ignore the success of popular groups in mobilizing and organizing to hold the state accountable to the public interest. Indeed, our consideration of the resistance they met from society’s dominant institutions deepens our appreciation of the meaning of those victories and the magnitude of the efforts behind them. For those dominant institutions hold far different expectations of the state, and they have never demonstrated any hesitation in mobilizing and organizing their own overwhelming advantages in financial and material resources to ensure that the state functions to protect and further expand those advantages.
This last statement captures the essence of what we mean by enforcement. In no way, however, do we view the efforts of corporations to pressure the state to adopt policies that place their private interests over the broader public interest as conspiratorial. To the contrary, in light of the historical relationship between private wealth and state power in the United States, it would be surprising if state policy, both foreign and domestic, did not reflect the interests of our dominant institutions. In fact, their interests frequently, if not exclusively, define how the state regards the national interests. There are, after all, reasons why those who define themselves as strict “Constitutionalists” today believe that the state should never waver from the intentions of its founders. We should remember that it was during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that James Madison declared “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation, putting in place checks and balances in order to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”3 So, the state has long conflated the national interests—the “permanent interests of the country”—with the interests of the “opulent.” Within this logic, the proper role of government focuses on the enforcement of policies and practices best suited for securing and, whenever possible, enhancing the dominance of those interests and institutions. That includes, of course, educational policies and practices, with schools becoming instruments of enforcement themselves.
We regard none of this as inevitable. Though the chapters in this book present a dark assessment of our recent past and our present, we cannot allow ourselves to succumb to a nihilistic despair that shuts us off from meaning and hope. To paraphrase Cornel West, the corporate elites within our dominant institutions may be mighty, but they are not almighty.4 History has shown us what a mobilized and organized public can accomplish in terms of pushing the state to substantively address its interests. We need to tap those energies once again to mobilize a movement in support of a democratic educational vision, one in which schools would serve the public and its interests, rather than the private interests and unaccountable power of our dominant institutions.
In conjunction with activism and social movements, teachers and other cultural workers inevitably make meanings through their signifying practices. There are always political and pedagogical opportunities at play not just in teaching but in all forms of communication. As the speed of communication increases through information technology, and as the economy grows increasingly organized around the subjectivity-producing activities of immaterial labor in an information-based economy, new opportunities unfold for producing new forms of subjectivity oriented towards emancipatory and egalitarian ideals, identifications, and practices. What keeps people assenting to endless war and corporate exploitation in the United States is not the barrel of a gun. What keeps people assenting is largely the pedagogical production of frameworks of interpretation, knowledge, and values perpetually constituted in schools and mass media that make oppression and exploitation commonsensical, desirable, and exciting rather than revolting. These knowledge-making sites are, however, highly contested. Democratic schools and a democratic society require the pedagogical production of joyful knowledge and dispositions of desire understood through human values of genuine freedom, equal social relations in all domains, the free exchange of knowledge, and the expansion of common goods and projects.
In addition to substantive updates to several original chapters, this second edition includes a new foreword by Henry Giroux and four new chapters that reveal the most contemporary expressions of the militarization and corporatization of education. Giroux’s foreword reflects his most recent work’s focus on the rise of authoritarianism and its relationship to neoliberalism. In Chapter 6, Christopher Robbins builds on his important study of zero-tolerance in his book Expelling Hope: The Assault on Youth and the Militarization of Schools. Here, he focuses our attention on the transformation of social relations and ethical bonds through the use of hyper-punitive control tactics such as tasers and other increasingly prevalent violent security measures in schools. Jason Goulah’s contribution in Chapter 9 examines how foreign and second language instruction in the post-9/11 context demonstrate a disturbing trend toward (re)militarization and corporatization. As an alternative to those trends, he draws from the peace education work of Daisaku Ikeda and his concept of “society for education.” Robin Truth Goodman addresses, in Chapter 11, the rise of single-sex classrooms and the ways they participate in how women’s bodies are being used to naturalize neoliberal privatization. In Chapter 17, Alex Means elaborates on the intersection of the militarization and corporatization of schools under the Obama administration, expanding on the securitization of the student in both a financial and a punitive sense.
1 See Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law,” The New York Times (April 15, 2009); and also Scott Shane, “U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric,” The New York Times (April 6, 2010). In addition to the New York Times articles, Noam Chomsky, in Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010) discusses the continuation of U.S. torture—despite the Obama ban on torture—by continuing to allow its most common form, which is the use of foreign governments to torture for the U.S. He references Allan Nairn’s reporting (see http://www.allannairn.com/search?q=torture). The American Civil Liberties Union have also recently published a report, The Torture Report, which offers both a tremendous amount of information and plenty of references, available at: http://www.thetorturereport.org/node/1. On the continuation of domestic surveillance, the ACLU’s review of domestic surveillance incidents can be found at: www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security/policing-free-speech-police-surveillance-and-obstruction-first-amendme
2 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3 James Madison (1787/2001), quoted by Sean Gonsalves, “The Crisis in Democracy,” Cape Cod Times (June 19, 2001), available at http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0619-01.htm (accessed April 15, 2010).
4 Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 34.